Virginia Woolf makes me want to vomit

The new film of Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours, which this week won a Golden Globe for best film, seems set to propel Virginia Woolf to new heights of literary esteem and celebrity on its release here at the beginning of next month.

Starring Nicole Kidman (who won another Golden Globe as best actress) with an amazing prosthetic nose, the film is, in part, about Woolf's tragic and glamorous life, beginning with the day in 1941 when, deeply depressed and fearing that she was plunging back into the mental illness that had plagued her all her life, she drowned herself.

Virginia Woolf and the intellectually glamorous society in which she lived have proved of lasting fascination. The posthumous publication of her diaries led to an obsession with her, and with the whole Bloomsbury Group. Biographies, films and critical studies have poured forth; hardly a year goes by without some kind of exhibition devoted to the art that the group produced. Everyone who ever had tea with Virginia, it sometimes seems, has had a full-dress biography devoted to them.

Woolf is a secular saint of early feminism and a martyr to those modern obsessions, child abuse and depression. The story of how she overcame early sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother to struggle for the freedom of women to express themselves and to gain a proper education entrances us. We are repeatedly assured, too, that she is one of the greatest of 20th-century novelists. But this always comes as a secondary consideration, and is taken for granted. How good, actually, are her novels?

It's hard to escape the conclusion that Woolf's novels are responsible for putting more people off modern literature than anything else. In many ways, they are truly terrible novels: inept, ugly, fatuous, badly written and revoltingly self-indulgent.

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It would be easy to make the case by talking about one of her more whimsical projects; the idiotic The Waves, for instance, in which six incredibly uninteresting people engage in interminable and ludicrously over-written monologues, interrupted from time to time by fey prose-poems about the sun rising over the sea, or something.

Orlando, an unstoppably arch fantasy about someone living forever, meeting a lot of extremely smart people from history and having nothing much to say to them before changing sex for no very adequately explored reason, is one of very few works of literature, apart from the works of George Meredith, that can actually make the reader want to vomit.

Those are easy targets, but more generally admired books turn out, on inspection, to be completely terrible in every respect. Take, for instance, To the Lighthouse. It is about an enormous house-party in the Hebrides, and crucially about the question of whether a trip will be undertaken to the lighthouse the next day.

Halfway through the novel, a long stretch of time passes in a few pages, during which the hostess of the party, Mrs Ramsay, is killed off in half a sentence. In the last section of the novel, some of the characters return to the house and actually go to the lighthouse. The novel ends with one of the characters, Lily Briscoe, finishing a painting. "Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision." Whatever.

Now, very good novels have been built on premises as slight or slighter than this. The great problem with To the Lighthouse is that Woolf is completely incapable of imbuing any of her characters with any kind of memorable life. The Ramsays have eight children, and a large number of house guests. Even at the end of the novel, it is almost impossible to remember which character is which; we are told a great deal about them, but they remain completely dead, just names having more or less tremulously sensitive impressions.

Kingsley Amis said that whenever he read Virginia Woolf, he found himself murmuring "Oh, no she didn't; no he didn't; she wouldn't have said that; he wouldn't have done that …" It's cruel, but true. In any scenario, Woolf is apt to crank up the emotional temperature. That word "extreme", in the last sentence of the novel, is a very bad indication of a novelist haplessly turning up the volume.

About the world, and about human motivation, she obviously knows almost nothing. Far from being worldly and sophisticated, she believed to the very end of her life that champagne was opened with a corkscrew. Famously, poisonously snobbish - "How I hated marrying a Jew", she wrote once - she is led by this to say the most preposterous things. "Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class," To the Lighthouse opines. "The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity." Eternal? I hadn't noticed one recently.

But the single worst thing about her books is how badly written they are. They were published by Woolf herself, without any editorial intervention, and it shows. An editor might have queried her habit of writing "for" when she meant ''because", her way of forever beginning her sentences with the present participle, and worst of all, her addiction to the word "suddenly". Everything in her books happens "suddenly"; sometimes four times in a paragraph. It is a clear sign of an author who has no real idea why anything should happen, or what naturally should happen next.

Away with her. There's a snobbish provinciality about the enthusiasm for her books, or for Duncan Grant's unspeakable paintings, which takes them at their own estimation. The truth is that there are great writers and painters of the time whose reputation has suffered from the fact that these self-publicising fourth-raters felt able to patronise them: Matthew Smith is a greater painter than them, and Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose success, pleasingly, gave Woolf sleepless nights late in the 1930s, are novelists whose merit effortlessly outclasses anything in her.

Nicole Kidman is never going to play Ivy Compton-Burnett in a film, but let's be clear about this. We are being impressed and moved by a sad and pathetic human story; not, by any stretch of the imagination, by the life of a great author.